NEW DELHI: The Government on Monday gave figures for its tax collections until September this year in Parliament, which showed that about 37.35 per cent of the targeted total tax revenues for the whole year had been collected in the first half of the financial year.
In reply to a question posed by Trinamool MP and former India football captain Prasun Banerjee, Minister of State for Finance Anurag Singh Thakur gave figures which showed that a mere 35 per cent of the direct tax target for the year had been collected until September 2019. Out of a target of Rs 1,33,5000 crore, only Rs 46,7369 crore was collected.
Some Rs 2.81 lakh crore was collected in GST until September 2019, out of a whole year target of Rs 6.66 lakh crore, less than last year’s half-yearly figure of Rs 2.89 lakh crore. In answer to a different question, Thakur also gave the GST collection figures until October, or for seven months, which stood at Rs 3,26,490 crore.
Sumit Dutt Majumder, former chairman, Central Board for Excise and Customs, said, “It means we are quite short of the required run rate, to use a cricket analogy. By September we should have collected about Rs 3.33 lakh crore. It will be difficult to bridge this gap given the slowdown in the economy.”
India’s economy, which has been experiencing a slowdown in demand, is expected to grow at below 5 per cent in the second quarter of the year, after posting a low growth of 5 per cent in the first quarter. Factory production contracted successively for the months of August and September.
To Banerjee’s specific question of “whether the government has assessed the effect of the slowdown on tax collection and fiscal deficit”, Thakur said an “exercise for preparation of revised estimates for 2019-20 is underway. At this stage, it may be premature to assess the Revised Estimate against the Budget Estimate with respect to taxes.”
Experts say that the half-yearly tax collection figures indicate that the fiscal deficit is likely to go awry.
In a note, Aditi Nayar, Principal Economist, ICRA, said, "Fiscal deficit of the Government of India rose by 9.6 per cent to Rs 6.5 trillion in the first half of 2019-20 from Rs 5.9 trillion in the first half of last year."